Jul 4, 2021 Hot Take

The Ocean? THE OCEAN?? The OCEAN...Is on FIRE???

Hey Hot Cakes,

We're back! Last week we took the weekend off to celebrate Amy's birthday, and after a week of some pretty okay news about climate, boy did things take a turn. Lots to talk about this week. We hope you're hanging in there!

Thanks for reading,

Mary + Amy

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The Ocean? THE OCEAN?? The OCEAN...Is on FIRE???

By Mary Annaïse Heglar

The Gulf of Mexico—confirmed body of water—caught on fire on Friday. Fire. In the ocean. The images looked like some shit out of a bad early 2000s action film about impending global warming. But, nah, these were newsreels. This shit really happened.

Of course, oceans don’t just “catch on fire”—not unless of course someone is digging up some of the deadliest, most flammable shit known to man and using an underwater pipeline system to ship it to refineries so that it could eventually be set on fire. And, the people doing that would HAVE to know that when that shit is set on fire, it’s going to egg on climate change. And the people trying to stop them would have to be labeled criminals. This ain’t rocket science. It’s not an accident.

When I saw those apocalyptic images, all I could think was: what if there was a hurricane in the same spot at the same time? What level of threat multiplication is that?

The fire in the ocean is greed run wild. We have to stop listening to the people who tell us that the end of capitalism is the end of the world. That is just a lack of imagination talking. There was something before capitalism, and there can be something after, if we build it. And we have to. I’m sick of this late-stage capitalism bullshit. Let’s skip to the good part. Let’s end this shit.

P.S. Wanna help stop some pipelines? Here’s some ways to get involved.

Exxon Continues to Be Full of Shit

By Amy Westervelt

Last week, in a remarkable expose, the investigative journalists at Unearthed (a Greenpeace project)teamed up with Channel 4 in the UK to publish videos of former Exxon lobbyists walking a journalist-posing-as-a-recruiter through the company's deny-and-delay playbook on climate. They laid it all out.

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People Waking Up to the Climate Crisis Is Good, Actually

By Mary Annaïse Heglar

If you’ve been attuned to the climate crisis for any significant amount of time, you’ve probably learned to fear the summer headlines. Of course, no season is immune to disaster, and it’s always summer somewhere, and disasters in the Global South barely get whispered about. But, summer is when shit gets really, really, really real in the Global North. Which means it’s the time we hear about it.

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On Not Giving Up

By Amy Westervelt

There's been a lot swirling around out there lately about climate despair, especially as climate impacts become more and more impossible to ignore. Is it over? Are we done for? Is there any point in continuing to fight? I mean...kinda yes on all three? Here's the thing: you don't give up the fight just because you haven't won yet. And yeah, it might not happen in your lifetime or the next generation's or even the one after that, but maybe the one after that will have you to thank for keeping on. And that's fucking worth it.

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